Social Question

How much deception does society expect and/or tolerate?

Inspired from this question, and it had me looking at ads and TV commercials with a much sharper eye. There is the presumed doctoring we know happens and those that might be there that we just miss or really do not know. They sell products for men and women to color their hair and hide Gray. Is hiding the Gray an acceptable deception? We know women have elective surgical augmentation of the mammaries, some of us can tell more than not, other just can’t tell at all, or don’t want to know. Is this an acceptable deception? You never seem to get as much whipped cream atop your sundae as the picture on the coupon or in the ad. Was that deception there? If you see a home ad, can you be sure the lawn is that great, lush and green with no hint of crab grass? Each day things are tweaked ever so slight to make them look more appealing or appear closer to perfect. How much of this fine tuning do we expect to see? Because we expect to see it does that make it more acceptable than something that was done to blatantly misrepresent what it is?

Tolerate? As long as it’s covered up, anything is tolerable. Expect? Well there you have the population split up between generally trusting thus not expecting any or little at all and generally suspicious who suspect moderate to high levels of deception.

Given the ratings for Fox News, I would have to say that we tolerate quite a bit.

As for expect, I think we do expect to be deceived merely because if we faced reality without the rose-colored glasses, we would be pissed and/or depressed. For that reason, we not only expect deception, we demand it!